AVA vs xUnit.net

Free and open source

Free and open source

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Established

OSS community · since 2015

Category standard

.NET Foundation · since 2007

• Process isolation catches hidden coupling between tests that other runners hide.
• Concurrent by default, so suites stay fast without configuration.
• Clean, small API with no magic globals.

• Per-test instance isolation eliminates a whole class of shared-state bugs by design.
• Idiomatic modern C# — no attribute soup.
• The default in current .NET project templates.

• No DOM environment; not for front-end work.
• No built-in mocking or snapshots comparable to Jest.
• Smaller community than the mainstream runners.

• Fewer built-in assertions than NUnit; most teams add FluentAssertions.
• The isolation model surprises developers migrating from NUnit.
• Parallelism defaults occasionally bite on integration tests.

Node libraries where test isolation and speed matter more than ecosystem breadth.

New .NET projects.